Helping immigrants to gain a facility in English is important not only in order to facilitate their integration into our society but also so as to ensure that inadequate command of English does not prevent them from deploying the full range of their talents here - to our advantage as well as theirs, writes Garret FitzGerald.
A striking feature of our recent immigration has been the high educational level of most of those who have come here. This contrasts strikingly with the often low-grade employment in which many of these immigrants, especially those from Eastern Europe, are engaged.
It has been remarked that the average educational level of our immigrants is notably higher than that of our own population. More than 40 per cent of them have a higher education qualification, as against less than 30 per cent of Irish people. That is misleading, however, because the immigrants are, of course, very much younger than our own established population - more than three-quarters of adult immigrants being under 45. The educational level of our own population under that age is very much higher than in the case of older Irish people, who grew up at a time when only a small minority of children completed secondary education - let alone went on to third level.
Allowing for this age factor, the educational level of our largely young immigrant population is in fact generally very close to that of our own younger population - although non-Chinese Asian immigrants have an educational level much higher than ours, for more than 70 per cent of those immigrants have benefited from higher education.
Incidentally, I think that many Irish people believe that our African residents - who now represent less than one-tenth of the total number of immigrants - are under-educated. But in fact almost 80 per cent of what the Census describes as the "Black Irish" have at least upper secondary education, and one-half have experience of higher education - the latter being almost twice the figure for our own over-40s!
Asians coming here tend to have quite a good command of English, and as a result almost one-third of them are engaged in the professions, including, of course, the health professions. That is twice as high a proportion as in the case of our own indigenous population - only one in six of whom is in that high-grade occupational category.
In contrast, despite their high educational attainment, only 4 per cent of Eastern European immigrants are in professional employment, which is far less than, for example, the 16 per cent of Africans who are in that category. This illustrates the scale of the mismatch between the educational level of our eastern European immigrants and their Irish earning-power - which reflects their contribution to our economy.
Now, if these largely well-educated eastern European immigrants were helped to improve their English skills, they would be able to contribute far more to our economy than they are doing at present. So we have not just a social interest but also a strong economic interest in tackling this language problem - which at present is being approached in a very inadequate and piecemeal way.
On Speaking Terms, a book by Dr Claire Healy which deals with this language problem, was launched by the Immigrant Council for Ireland two weeks ago, at a conference that brought out many important points about immigrants and English-learning.
First of all, our immigrants bring with them a bewildering heritage of 200 languages - although many of these, it is true, are African languages spoken by very small numbers of people. Among foreign languages Polish, as one would expect, comes first, followed in turn by Lithuanian, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, (which, because of the recent history of eastern Europe is a lingua franca for many Eastern Europeans), Latvian, Romanian, Slovak, French and Portuguese.
Our existing arrangements for teaching English to immigrants are patchy and unorganised. We need to learn from the experience of other countries - from what some of them have done badly, as well as from what they have done well.
Thus, some European countries, such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Austria, seem to have approached this task in a negative way, apparently using the language issue more as a way of controlling immigration than positively, as a means of increasing the contribution of immigrants to the economies of these countries and of helping them to integrate into their new environment.
As in so many issues, Finland seems to provide a better model, and some aspects of the German system could also usefully be copied here - for example: inviting public and private institutions to tender for the provision of English-language courses. But in general it appears that programmes organised by overseas countries which, like Ireland, are English-speaking - New Zealand, Canada, and in particular Australia - may be better models for us to draw upon.
What is clearly needed is an agency to organise the provision of English-language courses so as to release the potential of many of our immigrants to contribute more to our economy and our society. However, there is at present a danger that the coincidence of the emergence of this new need to address the immigrant linguistic problem and the Government's preparations for tight control of spending , because of a deteriorating economic and public finance situation, could lead to an unwillingness to embark on such a new process.
It is well-established that when cuts in public spending are called for they tend to be blunt and crude, often leading to considerable social damage, especially because of a consequent failure to tackle newly-emerging needs.
I would hope that in his budget preparations Minister for Finance Brian Cowen will wield his department's scalpel more sensitively than has often been the case in the past, and that he will have the wisdom to set aside for new needs, such as organising English teaching for immigrants, some small fraction of the €800 million contingency provision that last year he wrote into his advance budgetary plans for 2008.